Day 191

The young man speaks of the beauty of the land.
Fields of wild grasses, hillsides descending into the sea.
The sea the color of the sea at Siracusa, 
where Mariolina and I
floated for hours one summer.   (If she were alive
we would weep together….)
The cities destroyed,
the camps destroyed, the schools and the hospitals.
Yet wildflowers still bloom in the fields, blue and yellow.
The young man is talking about the garden of a friend
who has planted, unfathomably, vegetables, 
as drones pass overhead with their deadly cargo.
If they grow, if we survive until they’re ripe, he
is saying, we’ll eat them.